Category: Uncategorized

The Gloucester Clam Presents: Tournament of Shitty Intersections

  By

Remember our Tournament of Shitty Parking Lots? Well, we’re back again with the next installment of “vote until stuff happens”: The Tournament of Shitty Intersections! Gloucester has some of the most insane, death-defying, and infuriating intersections known to man. We shall, in the coming days, celebrate our miserable infrastructure by voting, tournament-style, on the shittiest of intersections. Join us!

 

intersections

Centennial & Washington vs Barn Ln & Eastern Ave

Centennial and Washington is first for a reason. It’s one of Gloucester’s premier shitty intersections, and it’s the first ones that tourists get a whiff of when they journey to see “the place from the Perfect Storm”. A few years ago there was talk about putting a stoplight in, but then who knows what went on but it never happened. It remains a gauntlet of suck – turning left out of there can take you twenty minutes on a weekend day or at prime commuting time, and if you’re driving down Washington, there are always two or three cars that will attempt to dash out in front of you, causing you to check how well your ABS and child restraint systems work. Even worse is when there’s people trying to pull out of that side street by Tony’s Variety. Every time I have to turn left from there, I say a prayer that Poseidon will just send a flood wave over the entire city because that’s more fun.

Barn Ln & Eastern Ave sucks almost equally as hard as Centennial/Washington, so this might be a tight race. Let’s add a bunch of beach travelers using a GPS to one of the toughest lefts, shall we? No one on Eastern will stop for you. Seriously, yesterday I had to go to Radio Shack (it still exists) and turning took 4 minutes and 32 seconds. At one point, a lady stopped for us, but the other lane of traffic refused and some angry minivan driving woman with her entire back liftgate smashed in beeped at her until she kept going. I always let people go if I have time, but it’s equally annoying when four or five cars take advantage of my good graces. The absolute worst is somehow being stuck at that intersection behind someone who has the space to turn left but stops to make sure left is really where they want to go. No. NO NO NO. JUST GO.

[polldaddy poll=8311951]

Tally’s Corner vs Essex/Western/Kent Circle

Tally’s Corner. Oh, god, this might be a long one. Is it a rotary kind of thing? No. Does it make any sense? Hell to the no. Let’s start with the fact that when you’re coming down Washington, the most logical way to get downtown, you’re suddenly forced to take Angle Street to get where you need to go.  And at the end, no one’s gonna stop for you. They will look you dead in the eye as they roll past you. It’s not any easier approaching Tally’s Corner from any other intersection, either. You think you’re gonna get out of the Fort? Not today, bubs. Add in people who have no idea who has the right-of-way, and then a random island cut-through that no one really knows the correct purpose of, and you have the shitshow that is Tally’s Corner. And we’re not even getting into Fiesta week and that area.

Essex Ave and Western Ave and the straight line that is Kent Circle (WHAT EVEN IS THAT) is another clusterfuck worthy of our Worst Intersection. Especially with the bridge. Oh, god, the bridge. No one understands that Kent Circle is two-way because IT BEING TWO WAY HAS NO USEFUL PURPOSE except to make life .25 seconds easier for the people living on Kent Circle. And that’s the way we make our decisions in Gloucester. “Two-way traffic here is unnatural and could lead to a terrible accident!” “True, but if Jim over here has to make 2 quick lefts instead of a right to get home, I will be voted out of office, as is customary in this town.” Anyway, you add in the people trying to turn left amidst traffic hurtling by at Mach Bridgespeed, and it’s just a giant disaster that should go far more smoothly than it actually does. Oh, and biking there is terrifying, because no one, ever, is looking for you.

 

[polldaddy poll=8312194]

Stay tuned for our next four contestants!

Pumpkin Spice: What Gloucester Needs

  By

This is another amazing post from our social media expert and altogether hilarious contributor Brooke Welty. 

With the arrival of autumn, tourists are starting to trickle off of the cape and return to their warrens and vast underground lairs to slumber for another year. This can present a problem for some local business owners who rely on tourist dollars to pay the bills.

Aand they're gone.

Aand they’re gone.

With this in mind, some enterprising locals have come up with a plan to lure some of the hardier tourists to the area during the chillier months; Pumpkin Spice.

Pumpkin spice is known to attract several types of people, and the local business council decided, during a recent secret meeting, to take advantage of the seasonal favorite by experimenting liberally with its application to popular tourist food items.

International Sign of Autumn

International Sign of Autumn

Local fishermen have had mixed success with the introduction of things like “Pumpkin Spice Dog Fish” and “Pumpkin Spice Flounder.”

“Well,” Said a captain of a local trawler, “Some women in yoga pants tried it and really seemed to love it. They weren’t sure at first what to do, but we packaged it as sushi and they just went to town. Some of the older folks though, they just didn’t get it. Said something about pumpkin spice belonging in coffee. Traditionalists, yah know.”

You can really taste the pumpkin. Also, the swordfish.

You can really taste the pumpkin. Also, the swordfish.

When asked what brought them to town now, at the end of the season, one of the women replied “We just love Pumpkin Spice so much. It makes me think of sweaters and leaves!” She paused, taking another bite of her Pumpkin Spice Swordfish, “Pumpkin Spice fish just really says ‘fireplace weather’ to me, and when I heard Gloucester was offering it…well! I had to come.”

Pumpkin Spice is helping about another local business, The Crow’s Nest. The late-night bartender said “Well we got a little thing of the McCormick does a pre-mixed Pumpkin spice blend, so we just started shaking that into the bottom of the glass before we pour the beer. It’s not even just the tourists that drink it up. These guys love it.” She nodded over to a long time customer, a man in his fifties with a graying beard who nodded, lifting his Pumpkin Spice Bud Light in return.

pumpkinspice

 

The allure of Pumpkin Spice is sure to breathe new life into winter tourism here in Gloucester.

(Bud Light picture is courtesy of Elite Daily, who are funnier than we are.)

No Snark Sunday: Fusion and all that Jazz

  By

Once, on a research project for an ad agency trying to come up with a campaign for long term health care insurance we found a weird thing: When you told people they have a 30% chance of needing nursing care, they would be less likely to buy it than if you didn’t, actually mention that. It completely weirded us out. You’re supposed to tell people the problem and then sell them the solution, that’s the whole job. Like, Problem: “You’ve got ring around the collar!” Solution: “Try Wisk! No, don’t drink it you idiot!” (advertising research could get pretty weird)

But in this case actually telling people about the reality made them far less likely to act. In interviews after the primary research with people whom we had told they stood a good chance of needing long term care, they mostly threw up their hands and were like, “Well, whatever. It’s in God’s hands, not mine.” It made them want to steadfastly do nothing, as if aggressively ignoring the problem would somehow make it go away, like a bee flying around your head

Just sit still and ignore it and it will go away

Just sit still and ignore it and it will go away

It’s what psychoanalysis calls “resistance.” You can caution me about a small problem, like that I have spinach between my teeth and I’ll act, and you can warn me about an acute problem, like my suit is on fire, and I’ll roll around on the ground.  But try and get me to deal with something big and long-term that is going to cause me a massive amount of psychological pain and I just shut down and do nothing. This is because we humans are, for all our intelligence about some things, complete fuckwits about others.

No I do not have a cigar

No I do not have a cigar

Thus, we have such a hard time managing big, societal problems. When faced with them a significant population of people just throw up their hands and say, “It’s too big!” and another, much stupider, bunch go into full-bore denial mode and start coming up with crazy-ass stories about the chemtrails and the Masons and the Rothschilds or drop some brain turd like about how a bunch of scientists got together and agreed on faked global climate research at which point I splurt hot coffee out my nose from laughter. I work with scientists a lot and you can’t get any two of them to agree on anything even when we’re trying to simply explain what a product actually does, right there, on the bench in the lab, in front of our faces.

What you learn about managing big problems is that you need to A) break it down into smaller, digestible pieces (“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your Pilot speaking, I want to highlight a single problem we’re having right now and that’s the loss of our starboard wing”) and B) Make sure there is optimism. That one is tough when you’re dealing with situations like the climate where you can kind of get to Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic living without much effort. You have to show people there is hope that the future is bright. Like, for instance the Mad Max lifestyle will mean lots of fresh-air and exciting wardrobe choices.

Tina rocked it

Tina rocked it

With that in mind, I’m going to drop some really good news on y’all. Everyone who isn’t a total dipshit knows climate change is a massive challenge facing everyone on the planet. But there is a really good chance that if we can keep it in check by doing some of the right things in the short term, the incredible advances being made in fusion energy research will save our asses in not-too-long a time.

Nuclear reactors of today work using the principle of fission, splitting atoms. It’s messy, hard to control, produces a lot of waste, has a lot of safety issues and is tremendously expensive to scale up and it’s increasingly difficult to economically produce fuel. Fusion is smooshing (technical term) atoms together is what powers the Sun and will be an amazing energy source right here on Earth once we learn to sustain the reactions. But the good news is that, unlike fission which needs to be shut down to keep the reaction from running away, fusion can be turned off like a light switch and the reaction won’t continue, explode or produce dangerous radiation.

Behold! Whats going to save our asses!

Behold! Whats going to save our asses!

I’ve been following the progress since I was a kid (Science fiction author Robert Heinlein always talked about it) and even though it’s been around for 50 years, it’s really only the last 20 years there have been tremendous breakthroughs in making is useful for more than weapons. There are incredible experiments going on in California and an ongoing international project in France is making an actual fusion reactor. As we learn more the progress tends to become exponential, especially as we get better with material production and computer modeling using artificial intelligence. I could tell you more but so many words, just watch the video. Yeah, it’s nine minutes and the guy is a nerd, but it’s the future of our species so maybe worth the watch?

This is not a pipe dream. The experiments going on in other places are also making tremendous progress. The estimate, and it’s not overly-optimistic- is that we can have fusion up and running by 2030.

That is not a long time. What we need to do between now and then is work on the intermittent technologies, the renewables and efficient systems. We need to keep our consumption in check. We need to fully fund the science and hold our government and others accountable and let public interest not specific industries make the decisions.

Mostly we need to not lose hope, because this power source is coming. Fusion happens in nature, in fact most of the visible universe is made up of plasma made from fusion. In just the past 85 years we’ve split the atom, harnessed its energy, albeit crudely via fission, and now it’s time to move to the far more elegant and efficient and exponentially less risky fusion.

Pictured: Not you

Pictured: Not you

And since the planet and our species and society will likely survive, it’s far less likely  your polished skull will wind up as the hood ornament of a spike-covered dune buggy. So you should probably also get long term care insurance, is what I’m saying.

Vegas and Our Impending Casino Deal

  By

Howdy, Clampadres! I’m fresh from the hot desert hell that is Las Vegas, where I was just at a convention for the job that kind of pays me. I’ve seen some things, and some stuff. Here is an abbreviated list of some of the eyebrow-raising shenanigans I observed:

– A drive through pawn shop and payday loan place.

'Murica.

‘Murica.

– A guy with white tube socks and sandals with a chinese symbol tattooed on his neck.

– An entire shop dedicated to those dumb bowler/trillby hats that men’s rights activists and neckbeards flock to.

– Pete Rose signing autographs inside a store with no one there. Two days in a row.

It was like this except worse.

It was like this except worse.

– A drunk man hanging halfway out of his motorized wheelchair.

– Walking into a bathroom stall that I thought was empty except a drunk teenager was vomiting in it.

The casino culture here got me thinking about what will eventually happen if the proposed casino development at Suffolk Downs goes forward. What will those casinos be like?  We have so much local flare here on the Noath Shore, of course it’s going to carry over into our assuredly world-class gambling facility. There’s no way we can be as insane as Vegas, but we can try our best. Therefore, I assume the following will happen once this casino opens:

– Stripper poles will all be equipped with cupholders that are large enough to hold a Dunk’s iced with a hot cup over it.

– 75% of the casino will basically be the part of Tedeschi’s where people just sit around a table and watch the KENO screen.

Like that, but with more Miracle on Ice shit on the walls.

Like that, but with more Miracle on Ice shit on the walls.

– Scratch tickets everywhere. Like, more than usual. Enough to blow onto the tarmac at Logan. I mean, they have all that snow removal equipment anyway, they can probably just use it year-round now.

– Cirque de Sully: Instead of breathtaking acrobatic feats, it’s just a bunch of former frat dudes with basketball shorts and Sox hats on who joined Crossfit and want to show off their sweet-ass squat jumps. Yo, Petey can even do a backflip. It’s epiiiic.

– Carl Everett signing autographs at the big dinosaur outside the Science Museum.

Google Image Search comes through with another winner.

Google Image Search comes through with another winner.

– A guy with white tube socks and sandals with a chinese symbol tattooed on his neck.

I, for one, am looking forward to the casino. I mean, look at Vegas. We’ve got all those pretty lights and a casino company raking in profits, and then the crippling poverty a few miles away. It’s what America’s all about!

 

 

Brooke Special Bonus: Clam Travel Insert : UK Part 2, Electric Boogaloo

  By

Because it was election day Brooke only got 1/2 day on this excellent post. We’re re-posting it so it gets the glory it richly deserves.

Hello again, Clammunists. It’s time to continue my travel feature, mostly because KT and James occasionally need a damn day off from filling the blog with actual content that people want to read. So, enjoy some stories about a faraway place, off the island!

I’ve been to Britain twice, and most of that time has been spent in the city of Bristol. If you’ve never heard of it, that’s ok, most Americans haven’t. As I said before, Bristol is neither London, nor anywhere near Downton Abbey. It sits a bit to the south and west of London, in an area of Britain imaginatively called The West Country.
HISTORY! It’s full of so much history that Bristolians (I’m not certain that’s a real word, but I want it to be) pretty much ignore it, walking past things like the ruins of a 1000 year old castle, Tudor architecture, and more medieval churches than you can shake a tortured heretic at on their daily errands without so much as a second thought. That said, it probably loses some wonder when you see it every day. God knows I no longer gawk in awe at the Gorton’s sign.
One of my favorite historical bits of the city is St. Mary Redcliffe, an amazing example of Gothic architecture in the form of a huge, ancient church. Go ahead and Google it, I don’t mind. Take your time, drink in those pictures.
This building is gorgeous and slightly terrifying. Heading inside, you pass through remarkably intimidating doors only to get smacked in the face with the sense that, holy shit, you’re actually standing knee deep in history. No actually, it would be more like chest deep.

Picture 8
All through the place are the tombs of the rich and/or pious , who are buried right in the damned floor of the place, with a big marker slab embedded in the tiles. A lucky few have above floor tombs with carved likenesses of stone. On a pillar of one of the stone tombs is carved “WM 1699.” Yes, some bored kid sitting through a boring sermon over 300 years ago carved his or her initials into a medieval tomb. Pretty badass move, WM. I hope you didn’t go to hell for it.
PIRATES! I couldn’t possibly touch on it all here, but Bristol has a ton of interesting history, including a lot of pirates. You can still see caves and passages carved out of the sandstone harbor cliffs where they hid their booty (heh..heh.) Blackbeard himself was from Bristol! How cool is that? That horrible pirate accent you hear in Movies? It’s a shitty, heavy handed Bristol accent. That said, a lot of the history of the city is bleak. Sadly, pirates were not the cheery rum swilling ne’er do-wells Disney would have you believe. On top of that, Bristol was a major slave trading port in the mid 1700’s, which is not exactly something the average vacationer likes to think about, so we will move on.

Picture 9

CULTURE The city has a hard to describe laid back sort of a feel. I can’t really put it into words, other than to say that it didn’t feel like anyone was hurrying anywhere, if that makes sense. It has a ton of charm, in architecture and just general feel.  We spent a few days in Nottingham, and the difference was stark. Nottingham was all angles, harsh looking buildings, and people without character, hurrying to get somewhere. Bristol is different, and I think this might owe something, at least in part, to the history of the city and how Bristolians (I’m keeping that word, dammit) lay claim to it and process the shittier parts of their shared heritage, some of which as I said before, is pretty goddamned bleak.

Bristol has been an epicenter for art for a while now, with a lot of poignant cultural commentary coming out of its fairly rough inner areas. Remember Trip-Hop, fellow 90’s kids? Tricky, Portishead, Massive Attack, they all came from Bristol, bringing with them a dark sort of weird aesthetic. Also hailing from Bristol is that favorite of White People who like to pretend they know about art, Banksy. The thing is, art is everywhere in Bristol. Even in the bleakest parts, buildings are covered with amazing works of graffiti. I don’t recall if there were any painted crosswalks, but there may have been.

NOT CULTURE! Know what else Bristol has a lot of? Chavs. What is a Chav, you ask? Think of Snooki and the other Jersey Shore kids, add more teenage pregnancy and drunken stupor. Wrap it all in Burberry plaid, and increase the violent tendencies. I saw a pack of them, all decked out in their finest tracksuits and wanted to take a picture, but my husband convinced me that I probably shouldn’t.

Picture 10
As lovely as Bristol is, it also has a lot of trash. Literal trash, as in garbage. Say what you will about good ol’ Merica, but our cities in general are much more tidy. Husband and I walked a few blocks to breakfast one morning and had to dodge multiple sets of stairs full of vomit and piss (remember that drinking culture I mentioned in my last article? HERE YOU GO), beer cans, and trash all over the sidewalks. On the plus side, I did find multiple fliers for the Lady Boys of Bangkok show, so there’s that. I think the Gloucester Arts Council may want to think about booking these gals.

Picture 12All in all, Bristol is great. Given the opportunity, I would spend a lot more time there. There’s so much to it, and so much I don’t have the space to tell you about (Let’s face it, this is already dangerously near TL;DR territory) so here’s a list of some stuff I didn’t get to tell you about, since you people like them so damn much. Google these things, or use your imagination, kids.
•    St. Nicholas Market – a fabulous 18th century market, with vendor stalls selling everything from meat to old records.
•    The River Avon – yes, THAT river Avon, of Shakespeare fame. It runs through the city, and you can take river tours and drink in floating pubs.
•    The Food- British food is actually excellent. It gets an unfairly bad rap. Bristol has a ton of fantastic food and I ate an embarrassing amount of it.
•    Historic Pubs – All sorts of stuff went down in the old pubs which are still standing in Bristol today. The Royal Navy Volunteer, the Llandoger Trow, the Hole in the Wall and others have all been host to a lot of shady pirate dealings, and have inspired a lot of writers. Go get drunk in history.